Slash and burn, Buffett style

While Warren E. Buffet languishes in the office atop his Omaha, Nebr. mid-rise, sipping cherry Cokes and slurping D.Q. Blizzards, thousands of poor women in third-world countries are being surreptitiously mutilated, burned, and otherwise scarred for life, with funds from his favorite anti-life "charities."

While this "Oracle of Omaha" blissfully whistles a tune as he tap dances his way to work, there to amuse himself with yet another day of counting his billions, millions of babies in the very beginning stages of their personhood, are being sucked out of their mothers' wombs with the tools and techniques he helps finance.

The billionaire septuagenarian is chairman and chief shareholder of Berkshire-Hathaway, Inc., the investment vehicle whose current assets underwrite his interest in promoting the culture of death. Mr. Buffett's focus seems to have two primary targets: watching his money grow and doing everything in his power to eliminate any threat to its ownership. With the same tenacity and focus that grew Berkshire-Hathaway from a faltering New England textile mill to a publicly traded monolith, Mr. Buffett seems intent on doing just the reverse to the world's population.

On any given day, one of the world's top three wealthiest individuals, Mr. Buffett reportedly neither spends much of his money nor gives much of it away, with the notable exceptions however, of a few local Omaha beneficiaries and his obsession with ridding the globe of any excess baby humans.

Recipients of his largess have of course been those organizations that are perpetrating the most evil, insidious, and vicious lies on the most vulnerable: the poor, the young, the ignorant, the frightened, the abused, the oppressed and the desperate.

The Buffett Foundation supports the Population Council ($2 million in 1994 to fund clinical trials of mifepristone-RU-486), the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, International Projects Assistance Services (IPAS), Pathfinder International, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), and Planned Parenthood, with funding specifically directed to enabling particular clinics around the country to perform abortions, as well as promoting all of its other nefarious anti-life programs and methods of defying the Almighty and playing God.

In addition, according to a report in the Omaha World-Herald, the foundation recently donated approximately $2 million to North Carolina's Family Health International (FHI) for testing quinacrine as a prerequisite to obtaining FDA approval for its use in the U.S. as a non-surgical sterilization agent for women. Originally developed as an anti-malarial, anti-parasitic medication, quinacrine was used for several years for this purpose until its replacement by safer drugs. FHI initiated testing of quinacrine as a sterilization agent as early as 1976, and according to the World-Herald report, began the FDA process in 1981, but eventually stopped, taking the position that "rigorous studies are needed to ensure the safety and efficacy of quinacrine."

Working with quinacrine sterilization developer, Chilean Dr. Jaime Zipper, the inventor of the Copper T IUD, and Drs. Steven Mumford and Elton Kessel (FHI's president at the time), the research organization developed a system in which quinacrine pellets are inserted into a woman's uterus, creating a chemical irritant (quinacrine hydrochloride), a powerful acid that burns her fallopian tubes and ends her childbearing ability. FHI eventually fired Kessel following disagreements with its board. Mumford, an avowed atheist, was also fired following his vitriolic attacks on the Catholic Church.

Subsequently, Mumford, subsidized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and the Scaife and Leland Fikes Foundations (Buffett's philosophical bedfellows in population control), created his Chapel Hill, N.C.-based Center for Research on Population and Security from which he and Kessel promote and distribute quinacrine throughout the world. Although its unapproved status makes its distribution and use within the U.S. illegal, and although the FDA has repeatedly ordered Mumford to "halt all distribution of any and all quinacrine under [his] control, identify its location and voluntarily destroy it under FDA supervision," he persists in his bizarre, illegal, and unethical schemes to prevent conception by burning, scarring and mutilating women.

In defiance of the FDA order, Mumford has reportedly stored approximately 300,000 quinacrine tablets at the center's underground headquarters. This unauthorized stash is targeted for illegal export to countries where women are used as guinea pigs and little or no approval or regulation is required, where norms for their safety are minimal and the moral concepts of sterilization advocates are all but non-existent. In many of these countries, even if the drug is officially banned, enforcement rarely occurs. According to New Delhi news reports, the drug, although "officially" outlawed, has been used in India to sterilize more than 30,000 impoverished, illiterate women, in many cases without their consent, and with no attempt to monitor their health. In Vietnam, thousands of poor women were victimized by this heinous procedure before it was eventually banned.

Thomas Merrick, population official of the World Bank is quoted in a Wall Street Journal report as saying that quinacrine use abroad "gives the impression that we have different standards for poor women."

Although the likelihood of the FDA ever approving quinacrine as a female sterilization agent is remote, organizations such as FAIR are ready to tout it as "the most important contraceptive discovery since the Pill!" And in countries where no approval is necessary, and where the level of information available to women is virtually zero, the practice of burning women's reproductive tracts to prevent conception threatens to wipe out entire populations of the world's disenfranchised.

Although the FDA considers the safety of quinacrine as a human sterilization agent highly improbable, with Buffett's funding, FHI can continue the work of Drs. Mumford and Kessel to underwrite testing of this barbaric procedure, moving forward with plans to obtain FDA approval of clinical trials. And, in spite of its own warnings that "there are several unresolved safety concerns, including the risk of cancer, potential damage to a fetus if inadvertently administered to a pregnant woman, and the possible increased risk of ectopic pregnancy," FHI does not seem to have any more qualms about taking Mr. Buffett's money to test a drug that has such ghastly potential than the man has about supporting such testing.

In the meantime, and no doubt with the blessing and cooperation of the likes of Drs. Mumford and Kessel, it is expected that off-label use of quinacrine will spread throughout the U.S. in a pattern similar to that of the abortifacient Depo-Provera, which was used for years as an off-label drug before receiving FDA approval for contraception.

But Mr. Buffet is not content to stop with preventive measures. He wants to make sure that all the tools available for killing even the smallest of babies are readily available through as many avenues as possible. One of his favorite "charities" is International Projects Assistance Services (IPAS), which has been heavily dependent upon Buffet's support for years. According to a Business Week report, the foundation's "1999 contribution of $2.5 million is part of a five-year, $20 million commitment, which will enable IPAS to double its capacity."

To abort very small babies while still in the very early stages of their personhood, IPAS incongruously markets manual vacuum aspiration kits (MVA) through the universally respected United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), originally set up as an emergency relief fund to help children in critical need due to disasters and the like. The World Health Organization (WHO) is another IPAS marketing avenue for MVA, which is noted on their lists of equipment for primary care.

Using a 50-cc syringe, MVA sucks the tiny baby right out of her mother's womb. The procedure (uterine evacuation) is touted by IPAS as yielding "a significant benefit for both the provider and the patient." MVA is also used to clean up botched "uterine extractions" (failed attempts to cut babies out of the womb). When the cutter does a sloppy job, MVA sucks out the leftover baby.

The Buffett-supported IPAS is also currently working to assess and introduce new technologies, the testing and introduction of medical abortifacients internationally and in the U.S., and to ensure that where medical abortion is offered, MVA is available as an alternative and/or backup method of killing babies who are waiting to be born.

What drives this strange Midas-like character who could be doing so much to eradicate poverty and improve the human condition, but instead seems hell-bent on supporting any and every means possible to eradicate the world's poverty stricken by ensuring that these poor children of God will never be born?

According to his biographer, Roger Lowenstein, Buffett grew up in a depression household in which their mother subjected her children to long, screaming tirades-there was apparently some "madness" in the family. Buffett also developed a strong fear of death and hostility to his parents' Christianity. Lowenstein interprets Buffett's obsessive accumulation of wealth as a wager against his own mortality.

In his book, Buffett: The Making of an America Capitalist, Lowenstein wrote that Warren Buffett "conceptualized in macroeconomic terms. He had a Malthusian dread that overpopulation would aggravate problems in all other areas-such as food, housing, even human survival." Apparently Buffett is so paranoid about this possibility, he will stop at nothing to prevent it, no matter how many women are hurt or mutilated, or how many babies are mercilessly and viciously attacked, sucked and torn from the safe harbor of their mother's womb, their only offense the mere possibility of their impending birth.

Admittedly, Mr. Buffett's greatest thrill in life is growing his fortune. "The problem I've got with doing anything else É is that there is nothing remotely as fun," he says. "I'm selfish that way."

Indeed!

Perhaps his greatest "thrill" in death will be the epitaph that reads: "Here lies Warren Buffett who tap-danced on the graves of those who never had a chance to live."

Anne Tinsdale is the editor of Celebrate Life magazine.